Saudi Scenes II and Dubai
Please check out this new photo album which has more pictures that I took around Riyadh and my trip to Dubai.
My trip to Dubai was very successful. I am now back in Riyadh all refreshed and feeling better since I was in a more normal atmosphere where people can wear shorts and drink wine and eat pork if they want to.
My flights on Saudi and Qatar airlines were good. They serve full meals even though the flights are less that an hour. They also hand out gifts to the kids like back packs and other stuff. It was like flying used to be. Since I was flying during the EID holidays, there were lots of Saudi families flying. The wives were mostly veiled but you could see their hands. Most of the ladies had henna tattoos on their hands and the ones with money had huge rings with huge stones of all kinds. They were all carrying designer bags and lots of times the black robes were covered with sparkles. I could also see multiple bracelets and designer watches. Some of the Saudi men would appear and multiple wives and lots of children would be following him. He of course carried all the passports.
When I got to my hotel they put me in an executive suite that was huge with a king bed – huge couch – work desk – dining area – absolutely huge bathroom and an entry hall. Needless to say that made me happy. It was a corner room so I was able to look out two different ways on a very busy area that had all kinds of action going on. The only bad part of the room was the carpet which was shiny emerald green. It almost glowed in the dark. The lights for EID reminded me of Christmas as they were all over the place.
The hotel had four different restaurants, Russian, Thai, Japanese and Irish. They also had an Irish pub that served food. Full buffet breakfast was included with the room price –YEAH.
Dubai was very hard to take pictures as there is construction everywhere. It is like a city of construction cranes as they are building a subway and elevated train track as well as all the sky scrapers going up. I took a “Big Bus” tour – double decker bus like in London. They take you to all the interesting places in Dubai and you can get off and on the bus as it comes around every 30 minutes. It was a good tour but the wrong time of year to take it as the humidity and heat are terrible. All the cabs are fully air-conditioned and cheap so it is better to use them than trying to walk anywhere with all the construction and humidity. The tour went to three different malls. So shopping seems to be the main attraction in Dubai – YEAH. Of course there are lots of malls with every thing imaginable to buy and it is cheaper than other places as it is a free port and they have no taxes. Companies from all over the world are in Dubai – there is so much money around it is amazing. All the high end stores are in all the malls – not sure how they make a profit.
There are many people from the Indian subcontinent in Dubai. They even have movie theatres that only show movies from Bollywood. Tourists in Dubai were from all over the world. I heard many languages being spoken by the tourists. It was good to get away and drink some wine and not to feel restricted.
Amazingly, the only thing that I bought in Dubai was cards as I found a good card shop in one of the malls. It is very hard to find cards in Saudi so I took advantage of the card shop. I even passed up buying cologne as I couldn’t find any that I had to have or didn’t have already. Looked at some carpets but they were all too expensive. Also couldn’t find any gold items that I had to have.